About Figures 2006

This show is about running, strength, confinement and release, stress & compression. My figures may be human, but strive to be more.

This work started early in 2005, when I was challenged by an artist friend to communicate visually my responses to an evening with Stravinsky at the Pacific Northwest Ballet. The two pieces that excited me most were "Apollo" and "The Rite of Spring". I drew two sketches on scratch paper that kept me working for more than a year.

The ballet performance and Stravinsky's music was full of tension, excitement, achievement, conflict, life and death. It energized and inspired me.

In April, on a driving vacation in Mexico, I investigated the possibility of using one of these images as the basis for a bronze sculpture.

In July, I spent ten days in the Centrum print shop, working almost feverishly with these and other images. I use the female image as a night goddess, perhaps the Egyptian goddess Nut or Nout, as well as in a more contemporary form. It is a very powerful image.

In November, the female figure in the first of my two sketches was translated into my second bronze work. The captive male figure in my second sketch informs my first bronze, which may illustrate an escape or rebirth from that captivity.